America learns something about Ahimsa thanks to Rodney King

http://astojiwo2012.blogspot.com/

I read that Rodney King died yesterday and I felt very sad to hear of his death. I remember the L.A. riots back in 1992 not in L.A. but in New York. I was just about to graduate from NYU and it was a year of great accomplishment for me. I had been awarded a full year scholarship from the Gallatin Department and therefore, ended up graduating a year early. I had also received a partial scholarship to study with Ellen Burstyn who was then mediator of the Actors Studio. On a personal level, the intensity was high. But the intensity would be even higher when racial injustice in America would become brutally intolerable and explode in fire and national violence.

It was the end of April and a few weeks later in May, I graduated. I had been practising yoga for only a year and a half as I had begun shortly after arriving in NYC. The high amount of stimuli and aggressiveness in the city that never sleeps quickly sent me looking for yoga somewhere in the West Village. I found it at Crush Gym and I was immediately hooked.

My powers of observation of the external world had already been highly developed, but yoga would teach me how to observe my own inner world. I would thus learn to be a witness to both worlds.

The day after the racial riots broke out in Los Angeles, the tension in New York City was so thick you could cut it with a knife. My inner powers of observation told me violence was in the air, and then my outer power of observation proved it.

That evening I went out with my roommate and a friend. Walking from the East Village where I lived to the West Village was like walking through a thick fog. It was a dark, gloomy evening. My friends had walked ahead and I had fallen back a few steps wondering why the air felt so heavy. I noticed a young African American boy walking further up ahead of us. His body was tense. Angry. I kept my eye on him. Observed him like I was taught to do at The Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Then I saw him side kicking the mirror of a parked car. He was walking in the same direction we were heading for. So I kept my eye on him. I continued to observe him and watched his every move.

As we neared the West Village my friends went looking for a trattoria and I stayed back on my own. That's when I saw something that would take me years to get over. The young African American boy randomly picked a young Caucasian student, threw him to the ground, and kicked him in the head. I felt terribly for the beautiful young boy with loose brown curls, the victim of this random act of racial violence, but it was when I saw his eyes rolling back into his head and the blood oozing out of the side of his mouth that I knew he was in real danger. I ran into the closest store and shouted "call 9-1-1-!" The rest of the details I wrote shortly after the incident, in a poem called "Witness" (below), because that's what I was: a witness to racial violence in America. It was not only racial violence against Blacks because here was a White boy getting beaten. It was just violence. Yet nobody ever heard about this young boy's beating.

I am sad that Rodney King died not because he died drowning in a pool but because he never got over his demons before he died. The terror he experienced branded his life. Alcoholism plagued his life. Yet he was a sweet, gentle, albeit tortured man. I wish he had found the yoga path. I wish he had lived a better life. But his presence on earth was very important for the evolution of man. Whichever way you look at it, the violent beating he experienced was an act of hatred and there was no justifying it in any way. The L.A. riots were an explosion of hypocrisy in America, the so-called land of the free. The awareness he had to stop his car on an illuminated street where the beating occurred was no accident, for that is where the video would be taken that would become the very evidence of racism in America that would consequently set L.A. on fire.

Rest in Peace Rodney King. Shanti, shanti, shanti.

The first Yama of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is Ahimsa: non-violence. The L.A. cops need to study it further because it doesn't just mean violence against others, but violence against one's own self. The more compassionate we become towards our own selves, the more compassionate we become towards others.

Witness

A peaceful young man turns the corner of a street.

Meets a violent young man who grabs his bag,

a backpack,

and throws it onto the ground.

Peaceful man is then shoved,

Falls to the ground and lands on his back.

The violent man then stomps his big foot

Onto his stomach

Takes one step back

Two steps forward

Winds up his other big foot

And kicks the peaceful man

In the neck.

Then walks away.

The peaceful man is even more peaceful

As he lays on the cold cement

Somewhere on Bleecker Street

Around 8pm

Limp as a rag doll.

People gather around

As blood seeps out the corners of his mouth

And his eyes roll back into his head

His soft brown curls fall back

from his red and white face.

I run into the pizza parlor

Tell the guy to call 9-1-1.

A cop arrives and picks a fight with a bystander.

“Everybody back off!” he yells.

“Do something you’re a cop!” they yell back.

Who dares touch the dying man?

Not the cop. Not the bystander.

Someone tries to lift his head.

“NO!” I shout. “His neck might be broken.”

They look at me. They leave him alone.

It’s the day after the L.A. riots in New York. 1992.

The air is so heavy you can cut right through it.

I could not sleep all night

The face of the college boy imprinted in my mind,

And the back of the violent man

Walking away like a goddamn hero.

Did he live or die?

I’ll never know.

He was White.

Violent man, Black.

I am just a witness to racism

in America.

Copyright Keren Bensoussan 1992